For Cmdr. Joseph O'Brien, thoughts of home aren't far away

PORTSMOUTH — The prospect of surfing the waves at Rye Beach is helping U.S. Navy Cmdr. Joseph G. O'Brien endure his latest deployment to the Middle East.

Joey Cresta

PORTSMOUTH — The prospect of surfing the waves at Rye Beach is helping U.S. Navy Cmdr. Joseph G. O'Brien endure his latest deployment to the Middle East.

O'Brien, 53, is currently stationed at Camp Leatherneck, a 1,600-acre U.S. Marine Corps base located in the Helmand Province of southwestern Afghanistan. But he was born in Portsmouth and spent the first few years of his life in Rye. He also lived in Kittery Point, Maine, for a time, and has since lived all over the country and much of the world.

"Everything is going well. It's a little bit warmer here than back home, but we get used to it," O'Brien said in a phone interview earlier this week.

O'Brien is the Second Marine Air Wing surgeon, and the senior medical officer for all Marine aviation units at Camp Leatherneck. An anesthesiologist by trade, his job in Afghanistan is primarily administrative in nature. He coordinates medical care for Marines and obtains supplies for physicians who serve as the primary care doctors for the squadrons.

"Here, it's obviously a little bit more involved. We're involved in stabilizing them and transporting them to the hospital," he said. "It can get very intense. Knock on wood, we've had a pretty good deployment so far. We haven't had any major traumas."

This is O'Brien's fifth deployment dating back to Operation Desert Storm. Since then, he has been deployed to Yugoslavia and twice to Iraq, he said.

O'Brien comes from a long line of military service members. His father was a Marine, his uncle and godfather were both U.S. Air Force aviators in the Vietnam War, and another uncle was a World War II fighter pilot.

O'Brien attended Boston College, where he was a pre-medical student, but he said his grades weren't good enough for medical school. In 1983, he walked into a Navy recruiting office and signed on with the service.

He said he started as a helicopter pilot, but eventually developed sinus problems and had to quit flying. At 35, he said, he started medical school.

Now, O'Brien said he is seven weeks into a seven- to eight- month deployment that has him overseeing medical care to Marines supporting Afghani government forces.

"They really look forward to being a country that stands on their own two feet," he said.

The work to build a democratic and functioning country continues, even as President Barack Obama declared in June 2011 that the United States had largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan and that American troops would begin to withdraw from the country.

"Our guys are right there with them. It's still very much an active battlefield," O'Brien said. "We're on a pretty big base, so it's fairly safe, but there's still a lot of fighting going on. I hope the American people would remember that. There's still a lot of people fighting and dying over here."

O'Brien, who is eyeing retirement in four years, said he is "incredibly proud" to work with soldiers as young as 18 years old.

"They just go at it every day without complaining. I'll tell you, our country has nothing to fear for its future with kids like this out here," he said. "I can never get over how great a job they do."

His time overseas has afforded O'Brien an informed perspective on an "incredibly different part of the world," he said.

"The culture is completely different. Their history is incredibly different from ours," he said. "Their outlook on life and death and hardship is completely different from us. A lot of what goes on is the will of Allah, so they certainly don't spend a lot of time dwelling on casualties the way Americans do."

Although O'Brien's family now resides on the North Carolina coast, he keeps several reminders of his first home in his office: a postcard from Bar Harbor, Maine, a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, and a magazine featuring an article about surfing the New Hampshire coastline.

Surfing and building surfboards are two of O'Brien's passions. He said he dreams of returning to the Granite State to surf in a blizzard.

"When I get home, one of the first things I plan on doing is getting up there and doing some surfing," he said. "That's where the best surf is."

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